Chaucer's Nuns

by Sister Mary Madeleva

THE NUNS IN the Canterbury Tales are characters around whom a proverbially romantic interest and an unproverbial set of difficulties gather. They are, like their twenty-seven companions on the pilgrimage, typical individuals of their class, seen through the fixating medium of Chaucer’s personality; seen by us through the less luminous distance of five hundred years. Criticism seems to have followed methods of microscopic analysis of them out of their habitual environment rather than telescopic synthesis of them in their environment. The problems they present are acutely psychological and prosaically human. Let us come to the matter in this wise.

Before we can attempt an understanding either of Chaucer’s Nuns or, indeed, of himself as artist in creating them, one must know in part the material on which he worked. A Nun, Religious, Sister-—whichever name you wish—is not merely a woman in a “cloke ful fetis” and “ful semely pinched…wimple,” nor even a woman upon whom the religious life has been superimposed, but a woman whose life has undergone a change more subtle and entirely spiritual than marriage but quite as real. The absolute proof of this statement is experience; the strongest ulterior proof is the word of one who has had this experience, corroborated by the whole world’s recognition of the religious state. The forces by which this change is effected are two: the first, a mystical but most real relation between the soul and God; the second, the rules and customs and religious practices of the particular community in which the individual seeks to perfect that mystical relation. These determine almost entirely, apart from the personality of the individual, the manners, the deportment, the whole external aspect of the religious. So apparent are the effects that religious communities recognize among themselves their outstanding qualities and characterize one another by them. The point I wish to make clear is this: Chaucer in depicting the Nuns was not dealing merely with women wearing a particular and conspicuous costume, symbolic of religion, but women whose whole selves had undergone a subtle change by reason of the two influences just named. He was representing the visible effects of a spiritual life of which he had no experimental or vicarious knowledge. That fact should be italicized in considering critically his accomplished task. And—which is almost more important—the Nuns themselves, to be interpreted at all, must be interpreted in relation to their Rule, their customs, and the community prayers by which their entire lives were regulated. Such an interpretation of Chaucer’s Nuns this paper proposes to make.

The Prioress and her chaplain were, according to Chaucer’s allusion, members of the convent at Stratford at Bow, a Benedictine abbey of note and prominence in the fourteenth century. This means that they were living under the Rule of St. Benedict, that their exterior conduct was regulated by the norm and pattern laid down in it, and that their interior or spiritual life reflected its spirit as it fed and thrived upon the religious practices prescribed in it. Chief among these practices was the chanting of the Divine Office to which we shall come presently. What their exterior was we learn from the Prologue; what their interior life must have been we can guess from the spirituality of their own prologues and stories proper, unconscious as their breathing and quite as natural. Now for an interpretation of these through the Rule of St. Benedict.

Logically we begin with the Prioress as she appears in the Prologue, and we look to her holy rule rather than to any other source book for direction upon her smiling, her oath, her name, her singing, her table manners—well nigh threadbare with much quoting—her charity, her pets, her cloak and beads and brooch, her age—mind you—and her chaplain; everything in fact except her face, which is after Chaucer’s best conventional pattern.

To interpret her “smyling...ful simple and coy” I would go sooner to the Rule of St. Benedict, with which Chaucer was easily familiar, than to the pastorelle of the fourteenth century where Professor Lowes hunts the phrase with such characteristic thoroughness.¹ For in the Northern Verse version one reads:

A priores hir fast sal breke,
And silence, when scho suld not speke,
To myrth hir gestes in that scho may.²

The prose translated by D. Oswald Hunter Blair corresponds: “When, therefore, a guest is announced, let him be met by the Superior or the brethren, with all due charity.... When the guests have been received...let the Superior, or anyone he may appoint, sit with them.... The Superior may break his fast for the sake of the guest.... Let the Abbot pour water on the hands of the guests; and himself as well as the whole community, wash their feet.” Chapter LIII.

Considering that this is the spirit of the rule under which the Prioress had enlisted, one feels that her smiling was the minimum of hospitality which she must have felt for strangers, at home, or abroad, and one understands her congeniality and cheer later remarked as a part of the same spirit.

Her lovely and romantic name is a sure target for remark. It is exactly what a little girl would be like to call her favorite doll. How did Chaucer hit upon it? By much the same process, I should think, as leads any author to prefer Anita to Hannah, or Eloise to Ella, as the name of his heroine. There is no written rule, so far as I know, for the giving of names in religious communities. It is a matter determined by custom, which is a form of written or unwritten practice in all communities, almost as binding as the rule and harder to depart from. In regard to names, three customs prevail. In some communities, the Sisters retain their family names, and Mary or Elizabeth or Susan Eglantine becomes in religion Madame Eglantine. This is not, I think, the practice of the Benedictines. Other communities, usually small ones, allow the prospective Sister to choose her own name. In most large communities the subject has no actual choice; she or her friends may express a wish in the matter, which may or may not be considered. However, the name given is either the whole or a part of a saint’s name or bears traditions of sanctity. Magdalen is a familiar example, taken not from Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, but from Magdala, her home. What clouds of sanctity trail from Madame Eglantine’s name are lost in the mists of a hagiography more familiar to Chaucer than to me. At all events its chances of being “self-chosen” are two to one, and if self-chosen, the chooser was Chaucer. That his choice was a canny one, I admit, with the canniness of a journalist.

I have thought it unnecessary to speak of Madame Eglantine’s negative oath, in view of Professor Hales' and Professor Lowes’ articles on it.³ The singing of the divine service contains two interesting bits of unexhausted inference. A word first in regard to the Office itself may be illuminating. Aside from the Mass, the Divine Office, or “service” as Chaucer calls it, is the most solemn liturgical prayer of the Church. It is composed chiefly of the psalms, arranged in seven parts with prose prayers and hymns appropriately introduced. The seven parts are: Matins and Lauds which are said late in the afternoon (by anticipation) or in cloistered orders, shortly after midnight; Prime, Tierce, Sext, and None recited during the morning hours, and Vespers in the afternoon or evening, followed by a postlude, so to say, called Compline. The Office is in Latin and is chanted and intoned, “entuned in the nose,” in various keys. It is recited daily by all priests and chanted in choir in such monastic orders as the Benedictines, the Carthusians, the Carmelites. A shorter form of the same solemn prayer of the Church, known as the Little Office, Little Hours of the Blessed Virgin, or Psalter, was used during the Middle Ages by the laity and is still used by all religious orders that do not recite the Divine Office. The Office is chanted by the community together or “in choir,” ordinarily, but when religious are on journeys they recite their office “privately”; that is, they read it to themselves. The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter XIX, says on this subject: “Loke ye do yure seruise als ye stode by-fore god almihti. And lokis, when ye sing, that yure herte acorde wid yure voice; than sing ye riht.” And, in truth, it is a matter of conscience with every religious to intone the Office “ful semely,” as it is the most important of all vocal prayers.

Here are the bare facts; now for their two promised inferences. First, Chaucer must have been familiar with the Divine Office, so familiar that he knew how it should be said. That he knew even better the Little Office will appear in the discussion of the Prioress’s Prologue later. Second, he must have been at some convent for only there could he have heard the “service divine entuned.” His statement regarding the Prioress in this connection evidently refers to her life in the cloister; no religious recites the Office aloud when traveling. One might go further and infer that through business or ties of kinship⁴ he must have been well acquainted with some community; a stranger or a casual visitor does not ordinarily hear the religious chanting the Office, or if he does, he is not able to interpret it as Chaucer does. This inference reinforces a theory offered later as to the possible unwritten source of the Nun’s stories.

One comes rather resentfully to the table manners of the Prioress upon which so much trivial comment has been expended. I will connect her ‘‘cloke...ful fetis” with her conduct at table, as having no slight bearing upon it. The Rule, Chapter LVI, makes this provision for clothing:

In comun places for alkins note
Sufficis a kirtil and a cote;
And mantels sal thai haue certayn,
In winter dubil, in some playne....

And when thai sal went in cuntre, (i.e. on a journey)
Thair clething sal mor honest be;...

And home agayn when thai cum eft,
Then sal thai were slik os thai left.

Here is explicit provision for the “fetis” cloak, and a homely, human reason for the Prioress’s carefulness at table. She was wearing not only a clean, but a new habit, which she would be expected to give up on her return to her convent. Is it any wonder that she was so effectively solicitous “that no drope ne fille up-on her brest.” I can well understand how Chaucer might have misinterpreted such apparent over-daintiness, and how critics have found it affected, even “a little ridiculous.”^{5 But none of them ever wore a religious habit, nor had the least idea of what real distress a Sister feels at getting a spot on her habit, especially at table. Her habit is holy to her: “a spot without is a spot within” is among the most venerable of community proverbs, and St. Bernard’s “I love poverty always but dirt never” is applied to clothing almost more than to anything else in religious life. This highly cultivated antipathy for dirt accounts more reasonably for the dainty details of Madame Eglantine’s conduct at table than affectation or an aping of the manners of the world, the ‘‘chere of court,” two things that are anathema in the spirit of every religious community.}

One other determining element in the Prioress’s character that even Chaucer might not have been able to account exactly for but which would manifest itself surely at table was her spirit of mortification. The veriest novice knows that mortification is the mainspring of religious life and bodily mortification is practiced in some measure by all religious at table. St. Benedict says: “Let two dishes, then, suffice for all the brethren.... For there is nothing so adverse to a Christian as gluttony, according to the words of our Lord: ‘See that your hearts be not overcharged with surfeiting.’” Chapter XXXIX. This may suggest a new meaning to the line, “ful semely after hir mete she raughte.”

The “rosted flesh, and milk and wastel-breed” for the “smale hondes” is an open extravagance except that these were gathered from the table after the meal was over. And this custom is as old as St. Francis and his brother Wolf, I suspect. Personally, I see every day of my life a Sister with as “tendre a herte” as the Prioress—an old Sister, by the way—gathering choice bits of meat and creamy milk for our excellent mouser, Fluff, and scattering “wastel breed” to the little warblers and finches around our door. I should say that this good Sister’s heart goes out to the canine world to such degree that more than one “hounde” greets her with barks of joy. One would have to live in a convent to appreciate fully what Chaucer has really done in these sixty lines of the Prologue.

The well-pinched wimple is one of the most interesting details of the Prioress’s dress. No one who has ever seen a Benedictine habit can miss its significance. The wimple or collar of this habit is as typical as the coronet of the Sister of Charity, if not quite so architectural. It is of white linen, accordion plaited or “pinched” to fit closely around the neck and over the shoulders in such manner that each plait forms a circle and the whole is a series of concentric circles. The mystery of its achievement might well defy the feminine mind; its neat and supple tidiness would scarce escape even the masculine eye. Small wonder, then, that Chaucer directs the attention of five hundred years to the well-pinched wimple. It was a feature of the Nun’s habit to elicit admiration from the least observant. Suggestions of vanity on the Nun’s part arise, it seems to me, from a lack of understanding of a Sister’s attitude toward her habit. It is a matter not of vanity but of duty to her to wear it modestly and becomingly as the uniform of her high vocation. Here, again, a secular point of view fails to catch the chief significance of things that may have deceived even Chaucer.

On the subject of the “smal coral...peire of bedes” one might expand into a brief history of the origin and use of prayer beads. Let it suffice here to say that since the thirteenth century such beads have been in common use among religious and lay persons alike. At that time they were called Paternosters, from the prayer most often said on them. Their manufacturers, Paternosterers, were a recognized craft guild. Stephen Boyleau in his Livres des Métiers gives full details of the four guilds of ‘“Patenotriers” in Paris in 1268. Paternoster Row in London commemorates the gathering place of a group of these same craftsmen. The prayer beads that the Prioress carried were the work of medieval handicraft rather than twentieth-century machines, an explanation quite sufficient to account for their exquisite beauty. Only one who has seen the large variety of beads in common use among Catholics can appreciate how lovely this particular pair must have been. The spirit of poverty would forbid a Sister today to use anything so elaborate, but in the days when things were not merely useful but beautiful, this pair of beads may not have been such an extravagance.

The suggestion that even Chaucer had in mind an ambiguous meaning for the motto, “Amor vincit omnia” or an eye to its cheaper journalistic value seems to me unworthy and inconsistent with his attitude of pronounced respect toward the Prioress. As a matter of fact, this is one of the commonest of epigrams among religious, and I know that one could find it worked in cross stitch, or painted in all the varying forms of realistic and conventional art and framed as a motto in dozens of our convents in our very unmystical and unmedieval United States today. I have no doubt that Chaucer himself had seen it so in some convent parlor, possibly in Norfolk where a ring bearing the same inscription has been unearthed and where there was a large Benedictine convent in Chaucer’s time.⁶ It is, in three words, the most typical motto that could have been engraved upon the brooch.

The “broche” itself, hanging from the beads, was undoubtedly a medal, one of the commonest sacramentals in the Catholic Church. It is a small object, much like a locket, bearing engraving and inscriptions of a religious nature. In itself it has no virtue; its value lies in the fact that it reminds the owner or bearer of some truth of religion and so inspires him to virtue. Medals are of unlimited variety and number and purpose. They are made of gold, silver, plated or oxidized metals, cloisonné, bronze, or cheaper substances and range from simple crudeness to exquisite beauty in workmanship and design. The Prioress’s “broche” is a good, but not an overelaborate, medal.

So much for the accidents of Madame Eglantine’s exterior. The discussion of them has been neither scholarly nor pretentious; it has regarded them simply in the light of the Prioress’s Rule, under a modified form of which the writer herself lives, and in that light has indicated details that the most luminous of old manuscripts might not shed upon them.

One other matter remains before leaving the Prologue: the question of the gentle Madame’s age. By what evidence or inference critics conclude that the Prioress was young I do not know. Professor Lowes, referring to the touches of artistry in the details of description, remarks on “the skill with which they suggest still youthful flesh and blood behind the well pinched wimple. Not only in his account of the amiable foibles of the Prioress,” he continues, “but in his choice of words and phrases, Chaucer suggests the delightfully imperfect submergence of the woman in the nun.” Which implies, if it does not state, that she was, more than probably, young. The emphasis, I understand, is upon the nice perfection of Chaucer’s workmanship and art. But from that very point of view I believe that there is a failure to appreciate his greater perfection. He has given us some one much harder to paint with his brush of words than a young Nun in whom the young woman is as yet imperfectly submerged. That task might have tempted his immaturity. But here is his picture of a woman a decade or more beyond middle age (my opinion) sweetened and spiritually transformed by the rules and religious practices of her choice, who can be in the world without being of it, gracious without affectation, and friendly without boldness. That she combines the wisdom of the serpent with the simplicity of the dove one realizes from her exquisite rebuke to the shipman when, in telling her story, she has occasion to refer to an abbot, and remembering his “daun John” she puts in her artless aside, “a holy man, as monkes been, or elles oughten be.”⁷ Personally, I think that a younger Nun would have expressed open resentment or have kept silence on the subject; only a mature woman of experience and courage and tact could have made and used an opportunity for a well-earned reprimand with such casual sweetness. She is a woman, evidently, who has taken to heart the Pauline lesson of becoming all things to all men, and learned it well. It is one of the ideals of all religious life, and it seems more natural to think that her “greet disport” and “amiable port” are the outcome of it rather than “compounded” like ‘‘her character,” as Professor Root says, “of many affectations.”⁸ The cheerful, dignified, kindly woman of fifty years, perhaps, is what the religious reads out of Chaucer’s Prioress, and she is decidedly a more complex character to penetrate and portray than a Sister with the natural gayety and exuberance of youth still about her.

One turns to the Rule of St. Benedict for some stipulation as to the age requirement for the office of Prioress. In the Northern Prose Version, Chapter LI, one reads, “The yung salle onur thalde, and the alde salle lufe the yunge. Nane sal calle othir by thaire name, but the priures sal calle thaim hir ‘sistirs.’ The abesse, for shoes in godis stede, sal be callid ‘dame.’” This might imply, from its context, seniority; but in the Caxton abstract one finds: “Such [Superiors] owe not to be chosen thereto by their age, but for their wertuous lyuing and wysdom, chastyte and sobre dealying, and also for their pyte and mercy, the whyche they muste vse in all their dedys.” Then follows a list of other qualities that are the very reverse of youthful virtues; prudence, for example, compassion, patience, industry, great and all-embracing charity. We are not to suppose that the Prioress or any other Superior ever embodied them all, but one looks for and finds more of these requisites in an old than in a young person.

Other proofs of the Prioress’s age are not difficult to find, proofs almost absurd in their homeliness. Most religious rules or customs even today forbid the keeping of pet animals. One remembers the terse injunction in the Ancren Riwle, “Ye shall not possess any beast, my dear Sisters, except only a cat.” That abuses to this regulation grew up Grosseteste’s comments leave no small doubt; a fact of more significance to us, however, is that when an exception to the rule is made, it is ordinarily in favor of an older religious. A Sister of fifty or sixty can have a bird or a dog or a cat with propriety; a Sister of thirty would scarcely think of such a thing. So do the “smale houndes” betray the age of their gentle mistress. This point may be too trivial to be of value; if it will serve no other purpose we may ‘‘use it for our mirth, yea, for our laughter.” Chaucer says the Prioress

    was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe.

Human nature in respect to mice has not changed since those days. No young Nuns that I have ever met, and they are many, would have been moved to tears at such a sight; most of them would certainly have screamed or have wanted to.

So the age of the Prioress rests, like Chaucer’s own, an unknown quantity of continued speculation. For the unchivalry of exposing these evidences of her advanced age, we offer the high security of the maiden on the Grecian urn, “she cannot fade.”

The presence of the Prioress’s companion is in strict accord with apostolic tradition and is followed closely in most religious communities. One is startled to hear her spoken of as a chaplain, a name ordinarily applied to priests. An article published by Dr. Furnivall in the Academy some years ago clears up the difficulty by explaining that the nun-chaplain is a regular office in Benedictine convents.⁹ And so the last difficulty in the Prologue disappears.

One quotation more from the Benedictine Rule will be of service in completing what I have pompously called a telescopic synthesis of Chaucer’s Nuns in their environment. It is the rule on journeys. “Let the brethren who are about to be sent on a journey commend themselves to the prayers of all the brethren and of the Abbot, and at the last prayer of the Work of God let a commemoration always be made of the absent. [A custom still practiced in communities.] Let the brethren that return from a journey, on the very day that they come back, lie prostrate on the floor of the Oratory at all the Canonical Hours…and beg the prayers of all on account of their transgression, in case they should perchance upon the way have seen or heard anything harmful, or fallen into idle talk. And let no one presume to relate to another what he may have seen or heard outside the Monastery; for thence arise manifold evils.” Chapter LXVII. This completes the portion of the Rule by which the Nuns in Chaucer and their conduct on the way to Canterbury should be judged. It is quoted to give some idea of the spirit in which a Prioress and her companion would undertake such a journey and what would be their responsibilities in regard to it. Nothing but a very urgent spiritual quest could have induced them to leave their cloister and join so worldly and public an excursion. It may be urged that the Rule was subject to many abuses, as no doubt it was, but nowhere does Chaucer give us any reason to think that his Nuns were of a tramp or derelict order; the reverence and courtesy of which he specifically says they were worthy is proof enough that he was depicting the typical “ninety-nine who need not penance” Sister rather than the well advertised one who does.

At the beginning of this study it was suggested that a fruitful and nearer-to-truth study of Chaucer’s Nuns could be made by viewing them in the light of their rules, customs, and community prayers than by the measure of a social life that they had voluntarily abandoned. The Nuns as they appear in the Prologue are chiefly viewed from the outside; one sees them here as they have been molded and fashioned by their rule. That rule has been applied to every detail of their description and in most cases has yielded a more human, if not a different, understanding of them. Putting these parts together and viewing the united whole through the kindly telescope of our common human nature we get in the Nuns of Chaucer’s Prologue more lovable characters and immeasurably finer creations than critical analysis shows us.

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¹ J. L. Lowes, “Simple and Coy,” Anglia, XXXIII, 440-451.

²Three Middle English Versions of the Rule of St. Benedict, Chap. li, 103.

³Hales, J. W., “Chaucer’s Prioress’s ‘Greatest Oath,” The Athenaum, Jan. 10, 1891. 54, Lowes, J. L., “The Prioress’s Oath,” Romanic Review, V. No. 4.

⁴Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, I, 100.

⁵Root, R. K., The Poetry of Chaucer, 190.

⁶Life Records of Chaucer, III (2nd series), 135.

⁷Bregy, K., “The Inclusiveness of Chaucer,” Catholic World, June, 1922.

⁸Root, R. K. The Poetry of Chaucer, 190.

⁹Furnivall, F. J, “Chaucer’s Prioress’s Nun-Chaplain,” Academy, May 22, 1880, 385, Also in Anglia, IV, 238.

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